About six weeks ago free-lance
writer George Ringwald proposed a story about the Bush administration
and the profound changes coming out of Washington. "Not
interested," I replied. "The Journal has plenty of
local stories to do. Leave it to the national media -- and opinion
writers."

"Ah, but I am proposing
a local story," he said, and he went on to successfully
argue his case.

Ringwald picked a range of
topics for his investigation -- tort reform, bankruptcy law,
workplace safety, the environment -- and began his interviews.
When he brought the story in, he had to argue all over again.

The article that follows
is a perspective piece -- that is, from the perspective of those
in our community who are most affected by those changes coming
out of Washington. It will undoubtedly provoke some controversy,
but we hope it will bring about serious thought and discussion
-- and some good letters to the editor.

by
GEORGE RINGWALD

A EUREKA FRIEND CONFIDED TO
ME RECENTLY THAT SHE SUFFERS "serious neck problems and
terrible wrist problems," and on top of that, tendinitis
-- "all from the computer" at which she works daily.
Sheri, as I will call her (she preferred anonymity for this article),
is a victim of what are known as repetitive stress injuries and/or
carpal tunnel syndrome.

She is not alone. Indeed, there
is a plethora of repetitive stress injuries among workers in
Humboldt County. The sad part is that under the new presidency
of George W. Bush, they can expect little help from the companies
that employ them. Before he left office in January, former President
Clinton had initiated a regulation requiring businesses to take
action to limit repetitive stress injuries on the job. The Republican
Congress, however, scuttled that in March, with the ready support
of President Bush.

And so it has gone down the
line: From a revised bankruptcy law that was vetoed by Clinton
in December and is now being resuscitated by the Bushies; to
the proposed legislation that would reduce business company liability
in judgments won by trial lawyers; and to an expected postponement
of Clinton's ban on road-building and logging in a third of the
nation's forest lands.

Humboldt County is about to
feel the impact of a federal government that makes no bones about
its alliances with and allegiance to big business. As a local
lawyer said about the new bankruptcy law speeding through Congress:
"Multimillionaires don't run up large credit card debt,
but the little guy does."

Dr. Steven G. Ballinger, 41,
an orthopedic surgeon with a seven-year practice in Arcata, posits
a poignant story of how "the little guy" with repetitive
stress injuries gets raked over the corporate coals.

"Some companies, for instance,"
he says, "don't start giving benefits to employees until
they've worked for six months, so you can weed out almost everybody
who's going to get carpal tunnel because they'll have it within
six months. And they'll say, `Well, you don't get any benefits
until you've been working here to six months. So, goodbye.'"

It reminds him of business practices
in England about the time of the industrial revolution: "If
you got killed on the job, they'd send a box of apples home to
your family."

Ballinger, who sees about 50
patients a month, says: "I've seen businesses that should
probably have a platform for loading up some shelves, and they're
making people lift 40-pound boxes over their heads repetitively
all day. I have seen young guys pulling green chain (the fellows
who help guide logs into the saw mill); they've been doing it
for two years and they already have arthritis in their wrists
and elbows, and their shoulders are shot.

"Most of the work people
do here are jobs that are physically demanding -- you think about
crab fishermen, surf fishermen, the whole logging industry pretty
much."

Ballinger, who writes poetry
and short stories when he isn't dealing with carpal tunnel cases,
suggests that the responsible thing for companies to do to lessen
job injuries is to hire a consultant who can recommend appropriate
job modifications.

"And it's a cost-effective
thing to do," he adds. "If it costs you $5,000 to hire
a consultant and $10,000 to change your equipment, you've paid
for two carpal tunnel surgeries right there. Employers are actually
helping themselves by doing that kind of preventative stuff.
They're saving money."

Responsible or not, it's no
big mystery that Dubya or Shrub -- a man who himself thrives
on nicknames -- would want to overturn the Clinton plan of getting
companies to alleviate their employees' injuries.

"It's money," asserts
Eureka attorney Zachary Zwerdling. "He's stating that people
who are major donors in this campaign were insurance industries,
manufacturers, large business interests. And they just don't
want to foot the bill for these injuries.

"There's nothing really
mystical about any of this. Every time a consumer issue comes
up, he takes the side of business against the consumer. Bush
wants to impose a national no-fault scheme (rejected twice by
California) that would deprive people in auto accidents from
being compensated for their injuries. He wants strict limits
on medical malpractice cases. Once again, I don't see much sympathy
or concern about the victims of other people's negligence. I
see a lot of concern about protecting big business."

As a trial lawyer, Zwerdling, of course,
is acutely aware of the Bush mandate to "defund the trial
lawyers," as one businessman puts it, and is quick to respond.

"We represent people who
have been victimized or very seriously injured, and the limits
that the Bush administration is proposing affect the most seriously
injured people the worst. Again, it's consistent with the philosophy
of not doing anything to help injured people, but to benefit
the people who contribute so much."

Zwerdling, 49, a virtual native
of Humboldt County (he came here as a very small child), also
fires a shot at the Bush plan to end the longtime role of the
American Bar Association (ABA) as a semi-official screening panel
for a president's judicial nominees. The GOP worries about the
assumed "liberal bias" among ABA members.

"This criticism of the
ABA wasn't around, for instance, when Reagan was president,"
he observes. "I think in fact he went along with a lot of
their reviews of justices. I don't know of any other way that
a president can get input from people (lawyers) who actually
appeared before these proposed judges. It's helpful information
that I would think anybody would want to know."

When I call W. Timothy Needham,
another trial attorney in Eureka, to set up an interview on the
Bush-attorney face-off, he laughs and says: "Which string
of epithets would you like me to use?"

As Needham sees the Bush move,
it's to get "a lot of donations from very large corporations."

He adds: "If you think you're eliminating
an evil by eliminating a small portion of trial lawyers that
you hate, recognize that what you're really doing is damage to
the consumer."

A member of the Board of Consumer
Rights, Needham notes that he has settled cases with automobile
companies "where they were clearly guilty of defective product."
He also mentions a class action suit "where we found that
an insurance company was cheating all the members in a health
maintenance organization."

He goes on: "It's the consumers
who get really hammered here. What they're trying to eliminate
is not litigation between corporations, but litigation between
consumers [and corporations]. And you see that across the board;
if you look to the agenda, it's not to eliminate lawsuits, it's
to eliminate the little guy."

When I ask for his gut feeling
about what's going on in Washington, he replies with hardly a
second's hesitation: "I think it's a tragedy. One of their
concerns right now is that attorneys in these cases work on a
contingency basis. They don't get paid unless the client recovers
money. And you hear this cry go out about the concept of contingent
fees. But the bottom line is that these days if it's a lawsuit
of any significance, nobody can afford it. The middle class can't
afford to hire an attorney on an hourly basis. If contingency
isn't available, you won't be able to have attorneys to work
with. And they'd love to eliminate that concept, because then
they can eliminate the attorneys for the consumer."

Needham concludes by saying
that the Bush administration is trying to recover what the Republicans
lost in the past eight years of a Democratic regime in the White
House. And they want to get it in during their first two years
-- before, as Needham sees it, their rascals lose their dominance
in Congress and the other rascals get in. "So now it's pedal
to the metal!"

Probably nowhere is this synopsis
more apparent than in the pell-mell rush of Dubya and company
to lay claim to the environment, for the benefit of their buddies
in the oil and power industries.

Big business corporations and
executives contributed heavily to the Bush election campaign
last year -- $146 million, for example, in "soft money"
offerings --now it was payback time for the new man in the White
House.

So if the timber industry was
against a Clinton ban of road-building and logging in a third
of the nation's federal forest lands, then it behooved Bush to
hold off the implementation of that ban.

And if the mining industry opposed
the Clinton proposal to reduce the permissible amount of arsenic
in our drinking water from 50 parts per billion to 10, then Bush
was obliged to reverse that too, on the excuse that the cost
was too high and the science too flimsy. Never mind that the
lower standard is that set by the World Health Organization or
that the higher level "increases the risk of cancer,"
in the view of Dr. Robert Goyer, former deputy director of the
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Perhaps the most sacrilegious
of the Bush proposals in the eyes of environmentalists is the
intent to drill for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge, known as America's Serengeti for its wealth of wildlife.
Making it even more ridiculous is that the United States Geological
Survey estimates that the area holds less than what the U.S.
consumes in six months.

Then there is the presidential
backtracking from a campaign promise -- no less -- to regulate
carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, as agreed to by the
U.S. under the Kyoto treaty, negotiated in that Japanese city
in 1997, in a concerted effort to halt the threat of global warming.

That is hardly an idle concern.
In its April 9 cover story on global warming, Time magazine
reported that the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change says that by 2100 temperatures will increase between 2.5
degrees Fahrenheit and 10.4. As Time's reporters noted:
"It took only a 9-degree shift to end the last ice age."

Administration critics again
see such pullbacks as part of the Bush payback to his big business
campaign funders, but the president shrugs them off.

In a White House press conference
last month, the president declared that he would "not do
anything that harms our economy," saying "first things
first are the people who live in America."

Given George W.'s near-irreverent
attitude toward our environment, it's hard to believe that this
is a son of the first President George Bush, who had the courage
to sign into law an acid rain program in the Clean Air Act of
1990. And it comes as something of a shock to read of two significant
pro-environment moves by this new Bush administration -- upholding
a Clinton administration rule to reduce industrial lead emissions
and expanding protection of the country's wetlands. Also, just
this past week the Bush administration announced that it may
reverse itself and even tighten the standards for allowable arsenic
levels in the nation's drinking water.

The fact is that Dubya is learning
the hard way -- from polls showing that fewer than 40 percent
of those questioned approve of his administration's handling
of environmental issues. It seems a bit glib -- to put it mildly&nbsp--
for Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman
to defend her boss by saying, "This administration has an
extraordinarily good environmental record."

But as with the other areas
explored here, let's bring the environmental issues home to the
local impact.

"Clearly if these scientific
predictions about global warming manifest themselves with raised
sea levels, there will be (local) economic impacts," Tim
McKay, executive director of the Northcoast Environmental Center
in Arcata, recently told the Journal. "Eureka may
have to build a dike, I don't know.

"But certainly during the El Niño
year when the ocean levels here were 6-8 inches higher, you had
a lot of bluff erosion. You had houses going off the cliff at
Big Lagoon -- and that was all associated with a relatively minor
increase in sea level. So if you have that increase on a much
broader scale, well, you can expect a lot more of these expensive
coastal properties to take a dip in the ocean.

"Then of course,"
he goes on, "they'll be around at the (county) Board of
Supervisors looking for subsidies to put retaining walls to save
their coastal properties. So the poor will be paying for the
wealthy's coastal homes to stay up."

McKay, 54, who started working
in 1975 at the Northcoast Environmental Center (coming up on
its 30th anniversary in July), is also able to localize Clinton's
road-building and logging ban in federal forests, presently held
in abeyance by President Bush.

"As much as 878,000 acres
could be protected in the Klamath, Mendocino, Shasta-Trinity
and Six Rivers national forests under the Clinton plan, which
was to have gone into effect March 13," McKay said. "There
are also areas in Humboldt County that could be affected -- an
area that we refer to as Mad River Buttes, right out at the headwaters
of Redwood Creek, very close to Humboldt Bay. Also areas to the
east of the Hoopa square."

As for the issue of arsenic
in our drinking water, McKay said, "I can't recall that
it's a huge problem in our area."

And in fact Carol Rische, general
manager of the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District, told the
Journal: "All of our testing has been `non-detec.'"

Or, in other words, the district,
which is a wholesaler supplying water to about 80,000 retail
customers from Eureka to Blue Lake, has not detected any arsenic
in the drinking water, which is drawn from wells in the bed of
the Mad River, northeast of Arcata.

"None at all," Rische
says. "Never. We're blessed up here with very high water
quality."

McKay, not given to mincing
words, recently lashed out in an Econews column at the
"anti-environmental ideologues and their corporate greedhead
fellow travelers" who now hold a strong foothold in national
and state politics.

But if you're looking for greedheads,
you want to take a look too at the credit card industry, which
is behind the push to revive the bankruptcy bill that Clinton
vetoed in December -- a bill that, once again, will hurt "the
little guy" right here in Humboldt County.

MBNA, the biggest credit card
issuer in the world, was the largest individual contributor to
Bush's presidential campaign, according to syndicated columnist
Arianna Huffington. She noted that right behind MBNA were Citigroup
and Morgan Stanley, No. 2 and No. 3 biggest credit card issuers.

MBNA's political donations last
year came to $3.5 million, up from a piddling $742,000 in 1996.

The bankruptcy bill, making
it harder for credit card users to liquidate debt, will hit Humboldt
County debtors especially hard, according to Eureka bankruptcy
attorney Thomas B. Hjerpe.

Hjerpe concedes that
the credit card companies are suffering financial losses from
bankruptcy.

"But," he adds, "you
would think the appropriate response to that would be to tighten
up their lending practices, to look into people's tax returns
and wage statements, to look at their income and debt ratio before
they loan money, rather than just taking a signature and giving
them credit. But they don't want to do that, because it's much
easier for them to give credit. So rather than take the obvious
appropriate response at suffering losses from default, they've
changed the law.

"This shouldn't be right,"
he continues. "It's not right for a private company to use
our government in that fashion. To change the law to gain a tactical
financial advantage over American business is not appropriate."

Hjerpe -- whose strongly expressed
ethics would, I suspect, surprise many of us in this era of laissez-faire
run amok -- pinpoints the biggest change proposed in the bankruptcy
law as "something called means testing."

In essence, said Hjerpe, it
means debtors who file for bankruptcy will compare their actual
living expenses to standardized expenses based on Internal Revenue
Service (IRS) expense schedules.

"So if this new law goes
into effect, as it certainly will, we'll have the IRS expense
schedule as an overlay," Hjerpe explains. "So when
a person comes in here with their living expenses, we will have
to compare them to what the IRS deems reasonable in that category.
And if their actual transportation expenses exceed what the IRS
thinks they should be spending on transportation, then the difference
is excess income that you should be using to repay part of the
debt."

Hjerpe doesn't expect a lot
of Humboldt County residents to be facing the "means testing,"
because it is triggered when the debtor has the median income
for the state. "And in Humboldt County," he notes,
"we have very few people who have the California state median
income. Most people around here have far less than the median
income."

However, Hjerpe says, "there
are many technical, small requirements that don't seem significant,
but they add up to big burdens" -- for the debtor, for the
bankruptcy court and for the bankruptcy attorneys.

"For example," he
goes on, "when we change the law as it's proposed, the debtors
will not only have to disclose their income, they will also have
to provide their last three years' tax returns to the bankruptcy
court, which means now the bankruptcy court has to create the
capacity to maintain those records; the debtor's attorney has
to copy the records. It's adding expenses to the cost of doing
the paper work."

It sounds in fact like bureaucracy
hell, and no wonder Hjerpe finds it "scary."

"The way this affects our
local debtors," Hjerpe says, "is that we have people
who are of the lowest income in the nation, or at least in California.
Additional filing fees will be proportionately much higher expenses
for someone with very low income. All this additional documentation
makes it far harder on someone with a very low income."

The bankruptcy court for Humboldt
and Del Norte counties now gets 30 to 50 new Chapter 7 bankruptcy
filings a month. In Chapter 7 cases, the debtor almost never
sees the judge, but has an appointed trustee, who is supposed
to use funds to pay down some of the debt. But as Hjerpe wryly
observes: "I would say 98 percent of the time there are
no assets."

Filing under Chapter 7, debtors
will "have to pay a lot more in attorney's fees and filing
fees, and they're not going to get as much of the debt eliminated,"
Hjerpe observes. "They're going to be carrying more debt
when they finish."

Talk about your Catch 22!

"They're saying people
have abused bankruptcy for too many years," Hjerpe muses.
"I don't see people abusing bankruptcy. I see people who
are in desperate trouble, people who are pushed beyond the edge
by too much credit card debt, and this (bankruptcy) is the only
solution they've got."

Let's face it, we all get credit
card solicitations in the mail every day. Last year in fact the
credit card industry sent out 3.3 billion -- that's right, billion!
-- credit card solicitations. And small wonder that consumer
debt now stands at more than $500 billion.

"We have a big problem
on our horizon," says Hjerpe. "I think the only resolution
is education. People need to be prepared before they leave high
school on how to defend themselves from bankruptcy. They need
to know how much a credit card costs."

California Sen. Diane Feinstein
proposed an amendment to the bankruptcy law that would have put
a cap of $5,000 on credit that could be given on a card to a
college freshman.

"Which I think is plenty
of credit for a freshman in college," said Hjerpe. "And
it got rejected. There's no way they're going to go for any kind
of limitation on how much debt they can accumulate."

He concludes: "This is
truly biased legislation, brought by the credit card companies
for their own benefit."

And in the spirit of President
Bush's proposed faith-based initiative, we could all say Amen!
to that.